What is the United States of America Now?

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.

The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.

It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).

It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.

King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.

Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.

But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.

It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.

The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.

But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.

Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.

But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.

On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.

Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]

These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.

I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.

by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty

[ed. For a more optimistic view: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]

Non-Technological Constraints to AI

Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.

By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.

The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.

We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.

The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.

The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.

A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.

“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”

There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.

Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.

Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.

Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.

Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]

Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.

It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.

Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]

The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.

But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.

Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible. 

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]

Cadillac Desert

CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. Illustrated. 582 pp. New York: Viking.

It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.

The money has gone into Federal water projects in the Western states - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future. More than a century ago John Wesley Powell, the nation's pioneer hydrographer and an explorer of the Grand Canyon, concluded that so much of the West was virtually desert that if all the flowing water in the region were applied to it, the water would spread too thin to make much difference.

But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.

It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.

The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.

Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.

Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.

''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''

by Gladwin Hill, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. A classic, and the bill's about to come due.]

Clearing the Market

Cushing, Oklahoma is the pricing point for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude and the physical hub through which US oil supply flows to refineries across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. As of 25 June, inventories have fallen to 19 million barrels, below the operational minimum (~20mb) that the industry considers the threshold for physical stress. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has fallen to 331.2 million barrels, the lowest since 1983. According to the IEA, global inventories are at their lowest seasonal point in recorded history.

The market has priced almost none of this. 

- Two Spikes Coming?

***

• The ceasefire holds, but the underlying deal has stalled on the points that determine whether reopening is sustainable.

• Iran is entrenching control over the strait through mechanisms – mines, fees – that outlast any ceasefire.

• Iran’s institutions can’t agree among themselves, so even a signed deal still may not compel the IRGC, hence the physical reopening the market is pricing isn’t coming on the MOU’s own timetable.

• Meanwhile the price is being held down by three cushions – released barrels that had been trapped in the Gulf, SPR drawdowns, and Chinese reserves and reduced imports – that are all finite, so the mispricing identified in Two Spikes Coming hasn’t resolved.

• New evidence this week – inbound tanker numbers, floating storage, operator testimony – confirms the physical picture rather than the price picture.

The argument in Two Spikes Coming rests on a race, between stockpile depletion and production restoration, with Cushing already near its operational floor and reserves elsewhere running out within one to two months. The past week has not changed that race, but it continues to indicate the reserve draws are still outpacing the return of flow.

The MOU signed on 17 June was supposed to settle the reopening. Instead it has settled into a pattern of brief traffic windows followed by a strike, a US response, and a return to the negotiating table to manage the aftermath. The Ever Lovely was hit on 25 June inside the safe corridor the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and Oman had set up along the Omani coast days earlier. The US struck Iranian missile, drone, and radar sites the next day. A projectile then hit the tanker Kiku and Iran fired at US positions in Bahrain and Kuwait. The US next expanded its target list to surveillance, communications, and minelaying infrastructure. Both sides then turned up in Doha this week and kept communicating, which suggests the ceasefire itself is intact, but does not indicate the deal underpinning it is progressing.

The two sides are not talking directly to each other in Doha. American and Iranian delegations are meeting Qatari and Pakistani mediators separately, a step back from the direct sessions held in Switzerland two weeks earlier. Iran’s stated priority is Clause 11, the release of frozen assets, and President Pezeshkian has stated that $6 billion of the $12 billion held in Qatar will be returned, though it is not yet clear on what terms or even whether the funds have moved. Iran will not discuss its nuclear programme until those funds move, but if that money moves without a matching concession on enrichment it will reduce the leverage the US has left for that discussion. Trump has claimed a deal was close at least 38 times between late March and early June, according to a CNN count. Doha is yet one more round in that pattern.

The strait’s governance is where the deal has stalled most. Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi has said the removal of “obstacles” in the strait, and its reopening, rests with Iran alone. The IMO’s Secretary-General has said Iran laid an estimated eighty mines across the main shipping channel. The timetable for clearing them is set by Tehran regardless of what Doha produces. The Joint Maritime Information Centre raised the strait’s security threat level to “substantial” this week, citing mine risk and clearance uncertainty. Oman has separately delivered a service-fee proposal to Washington and its allies. An Iranian official has called the fees mandatory, but a regional diplomat has called them voluntary. Either way, Iran can prioritise the shippers who comply and delay the ones who do not, so the dispute over wording matters less than the authority it establishes.

Inside Iran, more than sixty of the Assembly of Experts’ roughly 88 members signed a statement on 28 June warning negotiators against crossing Khamenei’s red lines, control of the strait among them. The Assembly’s own secretariat publicly distanced itself from the statement within hours, which means even the body meant to speak for Iran’s clerical establishment cannot agree on how hard a line to take. Pezeshkian spent the same week in Qom telling senior clerics the opposite, that the MOU was an economic win worth defending. And while the president was making that case, the IRGC struck a vessel inside a corridor the foreign ministry had just endorsed. Three arms of the same state, pulling three different directions, in the same seven days. No single part of the Iranian state can bind the others to one position, hence why incidents the negotiators did not authorise keep recurring.

WTI is trading around $70, close to its level before the war began, and Morgan Stanley has cut its Brent forecast on the basis that Hormuz is reopening faster than expected, projecting a 2027 surplus of 4.8 million barrels a day. “Strip away the narrative,” the bank’s analysts wrote, “and read only the prices. They describe a market that has weakened across the board.” Morgan Stanley may be right about a near-term glut – outbound cargo has genuinely surged since the MOU – but the mistake is extrapolating that burst into durable recovery. The analysts are getting the direction backwards because a weak price does not necessarily prove a weak market. Rather, in this case it means a market distorted by reserve draws and supply disruption, and both of those aspects are temporary props under the market, not foundational features. That makes Morgan Stanley’s case much harder to sustain.

Roughly 170 million barrels of crude that had been trapped in the Gulf cleared the market once the MOU allowed it out. The SPR is drawing at a pace that leaves perhaps three to six weeks of room. Chinese crude imports have fallen by something like 5 mb/d since March, while China’s visible commercial stocks have barely moved, which means the shortfall is being met from reserves that do not appear in any published series. Cushing itself fell to 18.96 million barrels in the week to 19 June, the lowest since October 2014 and near the roughly 20 million barrels traders treat as an operational floor. A partial reopening of the strait does not fix that on its own.

by Nick Wade, State of Play |  Read more:

Image: EIA, HFI Research

[ed. See also: Trump Paused War to Manipulate Oil Prices (video/YT). And, this: New Report Reveals True Extent of Devastation of US Fifth Fleet HQ in Bahrain with a special status update on F-35 readiness. Priceless. (Another good(?) read here).  I don't think this war is going the way they thought it would.]

Reflecting Pool Contractor - Greenwater Services

The $1.7 million no-bid contract to clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool went to a company ultimately owned by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, who previously pleaded guilty in separate federal cases involving bribery and campaign finance violations. The company's name? Greenwater Services.

via: X

The Times reported that the company is owned by the J.J. Cafaro Trust, helmed by John J. Cafaro, a Trump donor and one of the president’s Mar-a-Lago neighbors. His water purification company lists Cafaro’s mansion in Palm Beach as its address in Florida corporate records. 

Mr. Cafaro’s family business was in developing shopping centers, but he branched into other industries, including aerospace. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to bribe Representative James A. Traficant Jr., Democrat of Ohio, and later testified against Mr. Traficant.

In 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives expelled Traficant, who, until former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) in 2023, was the most recent member to be expelled. Traficant was convicted of bribery and racketeering in 2002 and was released in 2009. He died in 2014. (Mediaite).

[ed. Truth in advertising. If you were scripting this as a farce, no one would believe it.]

The Billion Dollar Crypto Man

President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion dollars from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.

Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.

Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.

Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.

Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.

The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many that have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.

Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.

The Trump business is growing abroad

The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.

Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid, and other important matters.

A property in the United Arab Emirates took in $10.4 million. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.

One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.

Trump took in in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.

The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.

Trump is now the billion dollar crypto man

After taking office last year, Trump reversed the Biden administration’s tough stance on the crypto industry and pushed policies friendly to the industry.

But regulators still had some concerns. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate polices, and are difficult to value.

Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled last month for a $10 million fine. [...]

Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their meme coin holdings drop significantly. The price spiked to more than $74 in the days after its launch in January 2025, but now sells for just $1.68. Also, the value of the World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they first started trading in September.

by Bernard Condon, Seattle Times/AP |  Read more:

Image: Alex Brandon
[ed. This actually plays like a feel-good story. The sheep MAGA cultists and influence buyers get fleeced - as predicted, as they deserve (Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t). Is this a great country or what? In other corruption news, see also: Trump is using a $500M no-bid contract to build his White House ballroom (Washington Post):]

***

White House officials last year secretly awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $500 million for the construction of the East Wing ballroom in an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The Washington Post. [...]

The estimated East Wing construction cost has tripled since July, when the project was first announced, with half expected to come from taxpayers, The Post previously reported.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the ballroom would be paid for by private donors and once said that Clark executives offered to build it for free.

“They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump told The New York Times in January.

Clark’s internal cost projections show the McLean, Virginia-based company, the largest general contractor in the D.C. metro area, stands to make tens of millions of dollars from the work...

The records reviewed by The Post do not break out Clark’s estimated profit margin for the entire project, but a March document shows the company projected it would receive a total of $65 million in combined profit, overhead and daily rates for on-site staff and other costs.

[ed. But, but... Hilary's emails!]

Testosterone and the Bible - the ‘New Punk Rock’

George, Wash. — At Freedom Con, there were feats of strength and CrossFit contests. There was an obstacle course and a station for practicing how to change a tire. There was prayer and music, and original verse from a pastor and tactical gear salesman known as the Warrior Poet. There were exhortations from the stage to run for office, to have more babies and to reject “woke secular gay paganism.”

“Heterosexual, sober men who marry girls and read Bibles, we’re the new punk rock!” pastor Mark Driscoll said in a fiery sermon that brought attendees to their feet.

More than 4,500 men gathered in central Washington over Father’s Day weekend for a testosterone-fueled celebration of Christianity and patriotism that culminated in a statement calling conservative Christian men “to rise as statesmen.”

Men came with their sons. They came with their pastors. They came with their brothers, their hunting buddies, their Bible study friends.

The two-day event took place just outside the small town of George, Wash., against the backdrop of America’s 250th anniversary. The amalgam of political activation, Christian worship and male bonding provided a glimpse of an emerging right-wing movement with masculinity as its unifying force.

Rick Slaughter, 44, camped overnight at the festival last Friday with a group of eight men and boys from around Orting. On Saturday afternoon, they smiled for a photo on the sloping lawn overlooking the Columbia River, with the state flag of Washington and another one reading “JESUS IS KING.”

The men meet weekly in a group affiliated with Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s ministry that boomed in the 1990s and has recently been resurrected with a sharper political edge. The trip was an opportunity for them to spend more time together and hear from political candidates and well-known pastors about their responsibilities as Christian men, as they saw it.

“What we’re trying to do is be better men,” Slaughter said. Many of the members have become sober and started marriage counseling since joining the group. Slaughter has gotten a handle on an anger problem, he said. (Federal prosecutors accused Slaughter of attacking Capitol Police officers in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, but the case was dismissed last year when President Donald Trump granted clemency to participants. Slaughter described the charges in an interview as “a lot of lies.”)

Driscoll, who resigned under pressure more than a decade ago from the large church he founded in Seattle, has made a roaring comeback as the evangelical mainstream has embraced his style of brash provocations in the Trump era. Accused of bullying and cultivating a culture of fear at his church in Seattle, he now leads a large congregation in Scottsdale, Ariz., and has a huge online following.

His sermon last Friday swept through the first books of Genesis and Exodus, drawing connections between ancient biblical stories and contemporary American politics. He described the Tower of Babel as an illustration of the perils of globalism, and an entity faced by Moses as “the transgender god of Egypt.”

“New days, old demons,” he said. “You men need to understand, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”

Many of the pastors in the program’s lineup were leaders of a growing cohort of politically aggressive churches closely allied with the Trump administration and its priorities. Some were there to promote new political and educational institutions that indicated their ambitions to extend their influence beyond the purely spiritual.

Grace City Church, a large congregation in nearby Wenatchee, spearheaded the event under the auspices of Stronger Man Nation, a men’s ministry. Both were founded by Josh McPherson, a pastor who has been invited to pray for Trump in the White House and whose empire now includes a popular podcast and a new “anti-woke” college he envisions as a “Protestant West Point.”

Issues mentioned from the main stage included social-conservative mainstays like abortion and gender identity but also housing prices and construction costs, in a state where both significantly outpace the national average.

“Even young men like me, who want to be providers, who want to start a family, who want to say no to vice and live a righteous life, are crushed by the weight of tyranny,” David Prince, a student at Grace City’s new college, said from the stage Saturday during a presentation with other Generation Z men.

Another recurring theme was how important it was for conservative men to stay in blue states rather than decamping to friendlier jurisdictions like Texas.

“What a weekend like this represents is an infusion of hope into good men who have been sidelined, by virtue of feeling like this is a David versus Goliath here in Washington,” Russell Johnson, 40, the pastor of a growing network of churches in Washington, said in an interview. “If all the good guys leave, the state doesn’t get better; it gets worse.”

It was up to pastors like him to encourage them, he said. “What in the hell is the point of having influence if you don’t use it for stuff that matters?” [...]

“Everyone shows up to vote for president, but no one shows up to vote for dogcatcher,” said Kenny Blight, 38, who is part of Slaughter’s Promise Keepers group. “I want a biblical dogcatcher.”

Almost the only women on the grounds, other than venue employees (and one journalist), were hundreds of volunteers from Grace City Church who each paid $55 to be there. (General admission for men was $199.)

“God created men for a purpose; they’re providers and protectors,” said Marcy Lyon, 55, who was volunteering with her teenage daughter. “When they get together and bond, it helps them stand up.”

A small pergola on the top of the hill was set aside as a women-only listening area for volunteers. A whiteboard read in looping script, “Ladies — please be considerate and enjoy this space quietly. We want to minimize distractions so our men can listen.”

by Ruth Graham, Seattle Times/NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Grant Hindsley/The New York Times
[ed. Jesus Christ...]

Leviathan Waking

[ed. I'd suggest reading this first: The Once And Future Fable #2.]

Imagine that there were no Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but there remained a large pharmaceutical sector, similar in size and scope to the one the United States enjoys today. In this alternate world, imagine that drugs were not licensed or otherwise formally approved by regulators; there were even officials in the executive branch who boasted that the U.S., unlike other countries, would not get into the regulatory morass of licensing drugs.

One day, a pharmaceutical developer warns that they think they have made a drug that cures a major Cancer at one dosage but is lethal at a slightly higher dosage. The company says, for this reason, that they are going to restrict release only to pre-approved patients and monitor their usage of the drug carefully—a sharp break from prior industry practice but one that the company insists, controversially, is necessary. This particular company had been advocating for years for stricter drug regulation, much to the chagrin of the government.

This causes a stir, and the government, not quite knowing what to do, announces that it will give drug developers the helpful option to show their drugs’ safety profiles to government officials before they are released. They are adamant that this is a voluntary program. The pharmaceutical company, being hopelessly literal nerds, and if we are being honest, more than a little bit obstinate, decides to release their drug without going through the voluntary program. “We already paused general availability of the drug while we did our own safety study, so we don’t need the government’s testing, and besides it is voluntary, isn’t it?” the company seems to be saying.

But then a handful of patients get side effects severe enough to hospitalize them, but not severe enough to be lethal. The government gets understandably upset, particularly considering their lack of experience in regulating drugs. “You talked up your own safety practices so much, and now we have people in the hospital. You are telling us that you are comfortable releasing chemicals that can put people into the hospital?,” the government argues to the company.

The company’s literal and obstinate nerds say, “well, we’ve thought about drug safety regulation quite a bit, and given how common hospitalization of a small number of patients is with a new drug, compared to the lifesaving benefits of our drug for millions, yes, we think the benefits outweigh the risks in this case.” But trust has already broken down, and this abstract, technocratic defense falls on deaf ears. “People are being hospitalized,” the government says.

And so the government bans the drug, indefinitely. It is not clear what the government wants more: a remedy for this specific side effect, a solution to all side effects from drugs, or, really, an apology from the company, as well as the sensation of domination over these disobedient, obstinate, and literal nerds.

In a matter of weeks, in our alternative world, the United States went from a system that was implausibly laissez-faire for the level of risk involved in this industry, to a system that was, in the eyes of essentially all expert onlookers, incomprehensibly strict and risk averse.

Fable, Jailbreaks, and Export Controls: What Happened

This, of course, is my read of what happened in the Trump Administration’s latest dispute with the AI company Anthropic. For those not following the blow-by-blow, what happened, in a few sentences, is:

1. Anthropic released Fable, a commercial version of their very-powerful Mythos model with severe guardrails to prevent misuse.

2. People liked it, though broadly speaking thought the guardrails were far too strict.

3. A few days later, officials in the Trump Administration (it is not clear who) became aware of a jailbreak that got around some of Fable’s safeguards (it is not clear how severely), and demanded that Anthropic de-deploy the model (it is not clear with how much specificity the government expressed the concern).

4. Anthropic did not de-deploy the model (it is not clear why), so the government imposed worldwide export controls against all non-U.S. persons on Fable and Mythos.

5. Because Anthropic lacks the ability to validate U.S. personhood for end users, this meant they had to pull down the models globally, for everyone. In fact, by some accounts, Anthropic has had to suspend internal usage of their model because of the risk that their own non-U.S. person employees might use the model.

You’ll notice the clause “it is not clear” repeated frequently above. The sheer opacity of everything that is unfolding makes it hard to analyze. There is no text for me to draw on, and no actual policy to criticize. There is simply a game of he-said, she-said played between two actors whose animosity toward one another is only growing and who both, if we are honest, seem to be making things worse for themselves and for the whole industry. [ed. Iran, anybody?]

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Why does this same chaos script keep repeating with everything this administration touches. Rhetorical question. See also: White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6 (DWAtV).] 

[ed. Update: Sorry, this has nothing to do with AI frontier models, but everything to do with decision-making in this administration. Can't help but laugh (or cry)... Promises Made, Promises Kept (Defector):]

***

"If everyone in the United States weren't living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one-note.

Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump's truest and most durable base is extremely like this: Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can't really imagine failing at anything they try.

This mindset scales all the way up to some of the most powerful people in human history, but it is the same all the way down. It amounts to the belief that only these particular wimpy pink goofs, each one the protagonist of reality, can be entrusted to run things, and that any problem can be solved by telling some underling to handle it, and also to the idea that such an order becomes a glorious and vindicating solution immediately after it is issued. Nothing that follows will ever be their fault. Provided you do not care about or pay attention to the world, this worldview absolutely rocks."

What It Means to Be a Democratic Socialist

“To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vogue, 2018

Democratic socialists’ decisive congressional victories on Tuesday night in New York’s primary elections solidified the far-left movement as an ascendant power center in blue states.

Now, as the progressive coalition prepares to expand its footprint in Washington, many Americans are turning their attention to the movement for the first time — and wondering, perhaps, what it actually stands for.

The definition often depends on whom you talk to. But the movement’s standard-bearers are united by their belief that direct government action — not the free market — is a better tool to solve problems for everyday Americans, such as the rising cost of health care and housing.

“Economic stress is something I lived with as a kid, and I feel it in my guts,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and an architect of the movement’s modern resurgence, said in an interview with The New York Times. “That’s what makes me a democratic socialist.”

In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright. Critics typically decry the likely high costs to taxpayers of some of these policies.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the organization, said the group surpassed 100,000 members earlier this year. About 1,000 more joined after the sweep of victories in New York on Tuesday night, he said.

Here is a closer look at the pillars of democratic socialism.

End Military Aid to Israel

The defining feature of primary races in New York on Tuesday was a litmus test on American support for Israel. Democratic socialists won that ideological battle handily, since staunch opposition to continued military aid is a key part of their campaigns.

The Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization in which members pay dues and are organized around a wide-reaching policy platform, says it “stands for the full freedoms and self determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, equality, and the right of all refugees to return to their homes and properties.”

Mr. Sanders said every time he has talked about Gaza at rallies across the country, he has received a standing ovation.

Expand the Social Safety Net

Democratic socialists want the government to lower the cost of living for Americans. Under their platform, child care, pre-K and public higher education amount to a collective good and should be completely free and funded by the government. They also support universal rent control, and want every worker to receive paid family leave.

In New York City, it was the political machine of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, that helped carry three progressive House candidates to victory on Tuesday.

Mr. Mamdani plans to open a free preschool center on the Upper East Side. Although directed at working families, the move has ignited a fierce debate over whether a city facing a major budget deficit should use taxpayer money to fund a free service in affluent neighborhoods.

Guarantee Free Health Care

The D.S.A. wants to create a single, government-run national program providing essential health care for everyone.

Right now, individuals and employers pay insurance premiums. People pay cash co-payments for drugs. And state governments pay a share of Medicaid costs. The system is expensive, but it allows individuals some choice in their care.
In a democratic socialist system, like one long trumpeted by Mr. Sanders, nearly all of that would be replaced by federal spending.

Many democratic socialists want to see private insurance entirely eliminated. Others are open to giving people the option to keep their private insurance plans.

Tax the Rich

There is no consensus about how much such a system would cost the federal government, nor exactly how it would be funded.

Proponents of democratic socialism say that higher income taxes on wealthy Americans and decreases in military spending would cover the costs.

by Emily Davies, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Graham Dickie for The New York Times
[ed. An over-simplified and somewhat dismissive description of DSA policies, but at least this political philosophy is finally getting some attention. See also: ‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History; and, The Left is Rising (Currrent Affairs); and Why the DSA and socialists are on the rise now in US cities (Vox); also Wikipedia's definition: Democratic Socialism.]

***

I'm going to hold off on any 'irrational exuberance' for now, but if there's one slogan I'd suggest any DSA campaign use, it's: "You own government. Make it work for you." That, after all, is basically the central theme of democratic socialism. DS isn't some monolithic political philosophy, with entrenched political policies. It's not Russia or China. It's an adaptable model, flexible enough to respond to shifting problems and priorities within the dicates of the US Constitution. It doesn't seek to wipe out corporations or any other businesses large or small, but it does want to make sure that there's a level playing field for everyone so that opportunity exists on all levels. The economic benefits produced from this capitalist system not only flow to shareholders, but also back into government programs and public improvements that everybody can benefit from and enjoy (like infrastructure). The worst thing (which opponents always glom onto) would be to focus too much on cultural issues or granular details (eg. appropriate levels of policing and incarceration; gender issues, etc.) and letting the big picture get lost in the weeds. Let those things play out in courts, not political platforms. It's time for change. New generations are crying out for it, and one benefit of the Trump years is that there's now a new understanding of what's possible in terms of shifting boundaries (and what tactics can be used). We need a new direction and DSA is the best option I've seen.]

[ed. Update: Again, establishment Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot, and provide more ammunition to Republicans by allowing themselves to be defined by what they're afraid of rather than what they stand for... See: Centrist Democrats Rebuke Party’s Left Wing: ‘We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist’(NYT):]

***

“The bottom line is that you have to give the D.S.A. and you have to give MAGA credit, because they’re organized,” Mr. Suozzi said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization. “And the people that don’t agree with their philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized.” [ed. 'Cocktail party' democrats, a winning message.]

Mr. Suozzi said democratic socialists were tapping into “real economic anxiety” and were “right in their diagnosis of the problem.” But he argued that Democrats should pursue policies grounded not in socialism but in a pro-union form of capitalism. [ed. with unions looking soon to be roadkill on the way to AI.]

A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, Dora Pekec, pushed back on the letter, saying in a statement that the “only thing extreme is defending a status quo where working families can’t afford to live.”

And a representative for the Democratic Socialists of America, Priscilla Yeverino, said in a statement that the group was gaining popularity because it was pursuing policies that Americans support, and that “Red Scare tactics are no longer working.”

“Ending wars, passing Medicare for All, forgiving student loan debt, abolishing ICE and taxing the rich — those are all popular policies” said the statement. [...]

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said the outcomes in New York were “dangerous” for Democrats nationally.

“What we’ve seen Republicans do very successfully before is weaponize the craziest ideas of the activist left,” he said. “And now the ammunition they’ve got is much, much more powerful.”

***

[ed. Update 2: Fortunately, Republicans are even more disorganized and demoralized than democrats, and their "ammunition" mostly blanks. See: Behind the Curtain: The cost of blind loyalty (Axios).]

Reflecting Pool Fiasco: 'Crazy Pro-Algae Protestors' Arrested

Most people don’t seem to be buying Trump’s excuses about the Reflecting Pool... Social media is flooded with jokes about “Sealant Team 6” and images of the reflecting pool as the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings films or with the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerging from it. Upon hearing of the arrest of former Olympian David Hearn for destruction of government property after he touched the detached liner of the pool “but didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” conservative commentator David Frum wrote: “If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.” [...]

Tonight Trump posted a picture of a person dressed in a pink inflatable frog costume with the word “AMPHIFA” written across the belly, carrying a sign that reads: “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ALGAE.” Trump called the activist “a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.”

“Who’s paying team algae?” social media poster The Volatile Mermaid retorted. “George Sporos?” [...]

Illustrating the degree to which Trump’s botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has come to represent his botched war on Iran, as well as the degree to which Americans have turned against both, social media users have taken to calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.” (The strait the Iranians have taken control of is called the Strait of Hormuz.) Yesterday the administration put fencing up around it to keep people away. [...]

Trump continues frantically to insist that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the acts of vandals. As Rachel Kahn of The New Republic reported, Trump insisted on Saturday that the pool had “worked perfectly” before vandals attacked, putting “a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work.” By Monday, the “gash” was 300 feet. By Tuesday it was 350 feet, according to Trump. There is, of course, no evidence of any such sabotage, and there are cameras on the Reflecting Pool.

Trump’s stories have gotten more and more elaborate, about how vandals used “a very sharp knife or razors,” “probably in the dark of night,” then added “chemicals.” He warned there could be a “10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things.” Asked for evidence, he claimed “we have pictures.” He told reporter Ed O’Keefe of CBS News: “[A]t the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court, but all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior.” Tonight the Interior Department began to place fencing around the Reflecting Pool. [...]

Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the product of vandalism by “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE,” and administration officials have stationed National Guard personnel around the Reflecting Pool. They appear to be handing out citations to individuals who touch the water.

A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. Trump answered: “Ok, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump went on to lambaste what he said were Obama’s botched repairs to the pool.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an Amerian | Read more: here, here and here

Image: Reuters/Reflecting pool May 2 and June 18

[ed. The jokes almost write themselves... ; ) See also: President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool (NYT):]

***

Bungling the $14 million-plus redo of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, concocting batty stories about what really happened — Knife-wielding vandals? Corrosive chemicals “illegally” dumped in the water? — and harassing innocent bystanders to distract from his own incompetence: These are not the most outrageous things the president has done since his return to office. But that is part of what makes this saga so irresistible and resonant. It is Trumpism made laughable — farce rather than horror or tragedy. [...]

Trumpian moves such as going to war with Iran and slashing Medicaid upend more lives, but those policy failures take a lot of intellectual and emotional bandwidth to process. And learning about the American military accidentally bombing an elementary school in southern Iran will make plenty of people want to turn away.

Some guy wasting a pile of money on a shoddy remodel? Everyone gets how pathetic and hilarious that is. [...]

With any screw-up, Mr. Trump ducks accountability by blaming nefarious enemies plotting against him. Only people mainlining the MAGA Kool-Aid will buy the idea that terrorist-vandals wielding magic blades (because please recall that Mr. Trump assured us last month that the pool’s fancy new coating was impervious to knives) sneaked past the surveillance cameras and security patrols around the National Mall to carve a 250-foot — Oops, make that 300-foot! No, better still, 350-foot! — gash in said coating. “WOW, who would do such a thing?” he raved in a Sunday social media post. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE.” [...]

Finally — and I cannot stress this element enough — this whole sorry episode is blessedly clownish. I don’t mean clownish like that bloody spectacle of a cage match birthday party Mr. Trump threw himself on the White House lawn this month. I count that among the legion of things this president celebrates that appall his critics but appeal to key chunks of his base.

Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool face plant, by contrast, is more Three-Stooges-meet-Bozo-the-Clown-ish. Getting bested by an algae bloom then throwing a finger-pointing tantrum about it doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem scary or threatening so much as petulant and inept. People are laughing at him, and that laughter undermines his image as a take-charge master of the universe.

This is the true gift of the reflecting pool meltdown. Mr. Trump looks foolish, with relatively minimal damage done to the nation. The economy will not crater. The global order will not be upended. No one will be deported to a foreign gulag. No one is likely to die. Aside from, perhaps, some poor little ducklings.

June 23, 1988: James Hansen Testified to Senate About Climate Change

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. . . . the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for ‘clean coal.’ . . .The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. — James Hansen

On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate stating the greenhouse effect had been detected, indicating that the climate was in fact changing.

Hansen was also arrested on this day in 2009 during a protest against mountaintop removal mining at Massey Energy Company.

Hansen has stated,

Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred. . . In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.

by Zinn Education Project |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed.  "According to science historian Spencer R. Weart, Hansen's testimony increased public awareness of climate change. According to Richard Besel of California Polytechnic State University, Hansen's testimony "was an important turning point in the history of global climate change." According to Timothy M. O'Donnell of the University of Mary Washington, Hansen's testimony was "pivotal," "ignited public discussion of global warming and moved the controversy from a largely scientific discussion to a full blown science policy debate," and marked "the official beginning of the global warming policy debate." According to Roger A. Pielke of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Hansen's "call to action" "elevated the subject of global warming and the specter of associated impacts such as more hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, to unprecedented levels of attention from the public, media, and policy makers." - Wikipedia.]

[ed. Which was all it took for climate change skeptics to spring into action, and here we are...]

Slow Motion Disaster

Water in the Colorado River is dwindling to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and the seven states whose residents and farmers depend on the river can’t agree on a fair way to divide up what’s left.

Negotiations are going nowhere despite more than six months of ongoing talks, plus cajoling by the Trump administration, which twice gathered governors in hopes of a breakthrough that never came. States are already sniping at aspects of a water-use plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation is set to unveil this summer and impose later this year, and they’re threatening to sue each other over water deliveries, raising the prospects of prolonged legal battles just as Western states face demands to sharply reduce water use.

The river’s system of reservoirs and canals was designed for the climate and population of a century ago. It has strained to adapt to a declining water supply and enormous growth in communities in the river basin, despite improvements in efficiency that mean even booming cities are using less water than in the past. Water rights that may date back to the arrival of European settlers also complicate matters. And a year of extreme drought is making it even harder to decide how much each state can draw from the Colorado.

It is not for lack of effort.

“We have invested time, effort and money in trying to facilitate a multistate agreement,” Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in an interview this month, moments after signing a deal that could one day augment the basin’s supply using desalinated water from a plant in Carlsbad, Calif.

But a day later, Cameron told a conference of water experts in Boulder that states have repeatedly rejected proposals for compromise. He said he doesn’t expect any state to be pleased with the measures the federal government is expected to take to delay or prevent reservoirs from dropping to critical lows in the short term.

“I think we’ve succeeded in making everyone unhappy, and maybe making everyone mad,” he said.

About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.

But the states have been unable to agree upon water cuts that would reflect the new reality.

In the river’s lower basin — which includes growing urban areas in California, Arizona and Nevada; vast agricultural operations; and the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead — communities have agreed to significant reductions in recent years. A new proposal that the states are asking the federal government to consider would curtail use even more, but the lower basin states and tribal nations have asked upstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to cut back, too.

But anytime winter snowpack in the river’s headwaters is meager, the upper basin is forced to use less water, so those states have resisted committing to permanent annual water use cuts. While a 1922 compact divides the United States’ share of the river’s flow equally between the two basins, the less-populated upper basin consumes significantly less water each year than the lower basin.

The stalemate between the basins has deepened as the stakes rise. An existing water-use plan expired this winter, and the states missed key deadlines to agree on a new one, which must be in place by October to avoid chaos and confusion in water deliveries.

A mild winter and extreme spring heat left winter snowpack so depleted that Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the upper and lower basins, risked falling below levels critical for hydropower until federal officials began emergency actions to shift water around and keep dams generating electricity. [...]

So far, Trump administration officials have resisted imposing any plan unilaterally, though Cameron said the bureau had “not been passive.” It has offered $454 million for water conservation projects across the basin, using money left over from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under President Joe Biden and included $4 billion for drought response in the West. Cameron said less than $100 million is left to help pay for more water savings.

“We have floated, three times, solutions that we thought represented something that the seven states could agree on,” Cameron said. “Turns out we were wrong.”

With the states unable to agree, the federal government is set to put new guidelines in place. Cameron said he expects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department includes the Reclamation Bureau, to release a plan in July to govern use of the river for the next decade. Before that plan becomes final, it would need approval from a White House that has so far not gotten very involved in Western water issues.

A draft plan released in January included a range of options, some of which would make significant cuts across the lower basin, where the federal government’s control of reservoirs gives it more power to cut off flows. The alternatives would force water shortages, mostly in the lower basin, based upon reservoir conditions. They include varying levels of cutbacks that would leave some risks of unplanned emergency water shortages in the lower basin.

Arizona is especially vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on the reservoirs and its relatively junior water rights.

As the talks stall, the threat of litigation is looming larger, even though negotiators have said they are hoping to avoid court battles that would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive and unpredictable. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, warned Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he would seek to block federal drought relief funds from any states that sue over Colorado River water.

In Arizona and Colorado, state officials have been readying lawyers and setting aside public funds for a legal fight over water. Earlier this year, television ads paid for by a coalition of Arizona water users warned that the state is “being targeted” with crippling cuts. Officials in both states said litigation was a real possibility.

In public comments submitted in response to the federal proposal, the states have hinted at contradictory legal interpretations of the 1922 compact, offering dueling arguments that both suggest that the Trump administration was at risk of violating that document. In dispute is whether the compact requires upper basin states to deliver a set amount of water downstream, regardless of conditions, or if the compact simply bars those upstream states from using more than they are officially allotted. [...]

Because the 1922 agreement is only about 1,700 words long, Entsminger suggested that the states might never agree on what exactly each of them is entitled to — and that was all the more reason for them to find common ground without resorting to litigation.

by Scott Dance, Seattle Times/NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Chet Strange /The New York Times
[ed. For a fictional and nightmarish vision of what a full blown water fight between states might devolve into, see: The Water Knife. For a detailed historical account (along with all the back-stabbing and dirty dealing) that produced water allocations and the sprawling cities we see now in the West, see: Cadillac Desert.]

How Everthing Became Left or Right “Coded”

In America today, there are conservative and liberal jeans (Levi Strauss versus Wrangler), beer (Heineken versus Coors), and footwear (Birkenstocks versus cowboy boots). The MAGA movement itself is seen as tied to Kid Rock and eating steak.

In an era when partisan division is so febrile that acceptance of political violence has grown and violent political attacks are on the rise — the Charlie Kirk assassination being the latest of great note — it is hard to remember that it wasn’t always so.

As recently as the 1950s, Americans were politically calm — so calm that a committee of the American Political Science Association urged the two parties to accentuate their differences, to provide a “true choice.” In 1964, Barry Goldwater campaigned for president as the Republican who would provide “a choice, not an echo” and was badly defeated for his pains. Some political scientists applauded the political apathy of the era as both a sign of popular satisfaction and a shock absorber for the system. Four generations on, there seems to be too much party difference and too little political apathy.

Why have we gotten to a place where even open-toed sandals are left-wing?

Simple answers might point to combative politicians, President Donald Trump above all, to aggressive social movements like the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter, or to changes in the media such as the rise of cable television and then online feeds like Facebook and TikTok. But the key dynamic, many researchers have found, is the increasing proportion of Americans for whom political affiliation is central to their identities — to what they think, to what they feel, to who they feel they are.

I need to stop right here: This assertion does not directly apply to most Americans. In 2024, only 30 percent of Americans described themselves as “strong” Democrats or Republicans (only about half even claimed a political party). The largest chunk of Americans are not partisans. About politics, they care little, talk little, consume little, and know little — and they vote little (although when they vote they determine who holds power, the partisans being evenly divided).

Still, the politicization of so many Americans matters even for the apolitical. The latter are the audience for the political theater — which Americans find “exhausting” — and when they do vote, usually only every four years, they are presented with polarized options. For the nation as a whole, it means less constructive cooperation and more animosity and anger. 

Still, the politicization of so many Americans matters even for the apolitical. The latter are the audience for the political theater — which Americans find “exhausting” — and when they do vote, usually only every four years, they are presented with polarized options. For the nation as a whole, it means less constructive cooperation and more animosity and anger. [...]

A different story of political polarization

But politicization entails much more than the parties dividing on policies. Politicization has now gone beyond shaping many Americans’ stances on issues or even their cultural tastes, to shaping who they are — whom they date (and marry and befriend), what communities they join, what religious faiths they profess, what life-and-death choices they make.

In the last several decades or so, more Americans have sorted or changed their views on many disparate policies — for instance, on immigration, abortion, war, climate, gender, and crime — to better fit with their identities as Democrats or Republicans. Views on abortion, so deeply tied to one’s moral intuitions, provide a dramatic example. In the early 1970s, Republicans were about as likely as Democrats to agree in the NORC/University of Chicago General Social Survey that it should be possible for “a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if she is married and does not want any more children.” Fifty years later, overall American opinion had not changed, but Republican support for such abortions had dropped by about 20 percentage points and Democratic support had increased by about 15 points; abortion had become a defining party issue. Similarly, in 1997 members of the two parties had, as recorded by a Gallup poll, the same level of concern about whether the effects of global warming had begun; by 2021, there was a 53-point gap between increasingly worried Democrats and increasingly sanguine Republicans.

One way this polarization could happen is that people switched parties to fit their evolving views on subjects such as abortion or the climate. Some of that surely happened. But much research shows that people as or more often switched their views to fit their political identity. This shows up in studies that follow people over several years and find that people often change their positions on a substantive topic after they first change their political affiliation, having adopted the new affiliation perhaps because of political events unrelated to that topic or because of new personal circumstances such as a marriage, a new job, or a new neighborhood. In other words, to follow the abortion example, many became Republicans (perhaps because of racial beliefs or new friends) and then became pro-life.

Increasingly, even survey respondents’ reports of what is real, such as whether the economy is getting better or worse or whether inequality is growing, vary by party. Party has become so important that opinions on how much racial discrimination exists now differ more between Democrats and Republicans than between Black people and white people; views of income inequality differ more by party than by individuals’ incomes.

Political position has come, for more Americans, to connect with all sorts of tastes far beyond government policy— e.g., listening to Kid Rock or Beyoncé, going to museums or playing golf, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or Antiques Roadshow. Consumption as political signaling — for example, coffee branded by political affiliation — has been vividly demonstrated in (my own) Berkeley, California: First, high rates of Tesla ownership displaying climate liberalism (as well as displaying a healthy bank account), and then high rates of protests against Tesla, displaying DOGE-fighting liberalism.

Some of this politicization might be dismissed as simply posturing, owning the libs, or what pollsters call “expressive responding.” But the politicization goes deeper than that.

Party affiliation seems to increasingly determine, and not just reflect, Americans’ important personal decisions. Much of the discussion about “affective polarization” — that more Democrats and Republicans nowadays actually hate the other side — started with a study reporting that more Americans were displeased in 2010 than were in 1960 with the prospect of gaining a son- or daughter-in-law of a different party. Years later, many single Americans rule out dating someone with differing political views.

A 2020 survey found that about half of both Democrats and Republicans have intimate social networks made up exclusively of people who share their politics. Survey respondents often see more agreement with the people in their lives than actually exists, but nonetheless, this homogeneity is substantial and has increased. (Social homogeneity, in turn, encourages partisanship and hostility.)

Such political homogeneity results in part from who individuals choose to spend time with and who they choose to avoid. Strong partisans prefer to be with the like-minded and to avoid conversations with the unlike-minded. And they tend to drop friends (not so much family) who disagree with them politically. By one estimate, 15 percent of Americans “have ended a friendship over politics.” Political homogeneity also results in part from the influence of family, friends, and neighbors to conform to their views.

Political identity affects people in less explicit ways, too. Americans have increasingly segregated themselves geographically — not primarily because they are seeking neighbors who are fellow party members, although some of that is going on, but because the reasons people move — or decide not to move — increasingly connect with party. Those, for example, who like large houses and big yards tend to end up in red neighborhoods, while those who like to walk to local amenities tend to end up in blue neighborhoods. Both ways, party and neighborhood have become more linked. A 2021 study concluded that many “voters live with virtually no [local] exposure to voters from the other party.”

Yet more striking, Americans have increasingly lined up what they profess religiously to fit what they profess politically. Religion and politics have long been entangled in the United States — in 19th-century fights over alcohol prohibition, Sunday postal service, and which version of the Bible should be read in public schools, for instance; this was Americans’ faith driving their politics. For about 30 years now, politics have been joining with religion and, importantly, political identity is driving expressions of faith.

It first became clear in the 2000s that those identifying as Democrats, liberals, and moderates were leaving organized religion and describing themselves as having no religion (as “nones”) in great part as a reaction against what they saw as the conservative politicization of the church, especially on lifestyle issues.

Then, evidence in the last decade or so accumulated that more conservatives were starting to profess faith, especially evangelical faith, probably for mirror-image reasons: to reject the secularism associated with liberal positions such as supporting gender transition. Ryan Burge, the dynamo researcher of Graphs about Religion, suggested to me that the recent leveling off of the growth of “nones” might be explained by conservatives’ view that non-affiliation had “become so linked to left-wing politics.” These conservatives “are functionally non-religious… but they still can’t bear to not ID as Christian on a survey.” That political affiliation has come to alter a significant number of Americans’ religious identities is profound testimony to the politicization of many Americans’ lives.

And then there is politics’ connection to life-and-death decisions. As might be expected, left and right differ on many health-related matters — childhood vaccines, cancer preventatives, and the dangers of tackle football, for example. But left and right also differ in health behavior, from diet, such as how much meat people eat, to exercise. One result is that residents of red counties more often tend to be obese than residents of blue counties, even taking into account race, poverty, and education.

The most tragic example was the Covid-19 pandemic. People in red states, where the vaccines were most resisted, died at higher rates than those in blue states; individual Republicans died at higher rates than individual Democrats. Hundreds of thousands of deaths can likely be attributed to political identity.

So what happened?

Seventy years ago, gender, race, and region determined Americans’ lifestyles, fortunes, and identities more than they do now; educational attainment and, increasingly, politics have become the key answer for many people to who they are.

by Claude S. Fischer, Vox | Read more:
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